Hittite religion was official policy as much as belief. As Hatti absorbed territory it absorbed the cults of that territory physically: the gods of a conquered place were carried to the capital, given offerings and added to the lists, and the phrase the thousand gods of Hatti appears in the treaties as a standing witness formula. The result is a pantheon of Hattian, Hurrian, Luwian and Mesopotamian layers in which the same deity often appears several times under different local names.
At the head stood the storm god of Hatti and the sun goddess of Arinna. The queen served as the sun goddess's chief priestess and the king served the storm god, so the royal couple were offices in the cult before they were anything else. Harry Hoffner's edition of the myths preserves the tradition's most distinctive story type, the disappearance of a god, in which Telipinu withdraws in anger and nothing grows until he is found and a rite of appeasement brings him back.
Itamar Singer's collection of the prayers shows the other side of the relation. They are legal in tone. The petitioner argues, cites precedent, offers restitution and asks that the cause of an affliction be identified, and the plague prayers of Mursili work through an inherited oath broken by his father as the explanation for an epidemic he did not cause.